The industry that manufactures musical instrument effects pedals for performing musicians has used a common product format throughout much of its history. A typical effects pedal has a ¼″ phone jack input on the right, a ¼″ phone jack output on the left, is powered by 9V DC from either a wall mounted power source or a battery, potentiometers and switches for the musician to adjust the desired effect and a large foot switch for the musician to either switch the desired effect on or off while performing. Throughout the industry, these pedals share compatible electrical characteristics, such as input impedance, output impedance, input voltage level sensitivity for adequate signal processing, and output voltage levels suitable for driving the next effects pedal or musical instrument amplifier in the signal chain. FIG. 1 illustrates the main components of a typical musical instrument effects pedal.
Effects pedals come with any number of potentiometers, switches and LED's to provide the user a variety of effects modifications and indications of particular effects currently selected. A large foot switch on the pedal allows the musician to either select the pedal for the desired effect or bypass the pedal effectively connecting the signal input to the output with no change to the signal having passed through the pedal. Because virtually all effects pedals share these common features, musicians are able to choose effects pedals from a variety of different effects pedal manufactures to achieve the desired musical tone of their particular guitar, bass or other musical instrument. Any number of pedals can be combined from one to several dozen or more. FIG. 2 illustrates a typical configuration for a set of musical instrument effects pedals a musician has chosen for his or her particular musical instrument effects requirements. In this example, only three musical instrument effects pedals are shown to illustrate the intent, but any number of pedals is possible.
There are thousands of different pedals from hundreds of different manufactures to choose from and they are electrically input and output compatible. This variety of different pedals also has another common feature in that they typically have potentiometers and switches that must be manually adjusted to change the desired effect. If a musician wishes to change an effect during a song, he or she must stop playing and reach down to turn a potentiometer or change a switch setting, which is impractical. Often the effect on the analog signal is very sensitive to the position of the potentiometer; so, it is very difficult to achieve the effect quickly and exact reproduction is limited to the players' patience. Most musicians simply set a particular pedal to a fixed effect and either switch it in or out of the signal path with a foot switch; hence, musical instrument effects pedals are often denoted by the term stomp box. The current method of manually adjusting potentiometers and toggling switches places restrictions on the user experience of achieving maximum tonal flexibility from any given pedal; so, most musicians simply set a stomp box to a particular effect and forget about changing it.
Thus far, the industry solution for improving the user experience of performing with a variety of effects pedals from various competing firms has been the introduction of the user configurable analog cross point switch. The cross point switch takes the input and output from every effects pedal into an array of ¼″ phone jacks and circuitry internal to the cross point switch that can either bypass the effects pedal, place the effects pedal in the signal chain, reconfigure the order of the effects pedals, or any combination of these actions. The various configurations are determined beforehand by the musician and programmed into the cross point switch either by switches and a display on the cross point switch or by the aid of a computer over an interface. Most of these user interfaces are cryptic and require patience to understand and time to gain proficiency. It is important to note that the cross point switch does not modify the settings of the potentiometers or switches on the effects pedals plugged into it, including the footswitch. Effects pedals that are plugged into a cross point switch must be enabled continuously for the cross point switch to function. If an effects pedal is in the bypass state, there is no way for the cross point switch to change its state to make the effects pedal useful. FIG. 3 depicts a typical configuration for a cross point switch with several effects pedals. In addition to a cross point switch, it is typical to have a common power supply for numerous effects pedals. Such a configuration reduces the number of wall mounted power supplies and power strips; but, there are still a considerable number of ¼″ phone jack interconnections and power cables connecting everything together.